Toronto Housing Affordability

If you read yesterday’s post, I spent it ranting on about how I was fed up seeing bad metrics used to explain what is going on in the housing market in Toronto. So today I thought it might be useful if I showed you a better metric. So get ready for it, another day, another exciting metric.

What I said yesterday was that it is silly to compare the price of the average house to average income. That’s because what people are committing to is not the price of a house but a stream of mortgage payments. If they can afford the mortgage payments, who cares what the price of the house is?

The chart I so elegantly constructed above with the help of my best friend, Mr. Excel, shows with the red bars, the price of the average house in 2016 dollars in Toronto. (That way you can see real increases instead of seeing the effect that inflation had in the 1970s and 1980s.)

The blue line shows a much better metric, the percent of monthly income required for the average family to afford the average house. Banks will only lend up to a certain point and that lending doesn’t care what the price of a house is, only what the percent of a person’s income will be spent on housing. So this metric has real applicability. At some point the average house becomes too expensive and the market for housing dries up and crashes.

Let’s look at a few prior crashes. Mortgage interest rates went wild in 1981 and 1982, reaching almost 20%. (Can you imagine what that would be like now?) The result was a spike in the percent needed to buy the average house. During this period, you can see that the real price (inflation adjusted) of housing declined steadily from 1976 until 1984. This decline was masked by inflation which made everyone feel prices were actually going up

The next major peak was in 1989/1990. Interest rates at the time weren’t as much of a problem. They went from 11.25% in 1987 to 14.25% in 1990. During that time, an irrational exuberance in the market coupled with a boomer influx caused house prices to climb rapidly. But interest rates spiked, caught the market off guard, made banks tighten lending, and made it unaffordable for the average person to buy the average house. The result was a precipitous decline in the market.

The next real dollar decline in prices was in 2007/2008 but this one was small. Interest rates at the time were hovering around six and seven percent. They weren’t the cause of the crash though. I’m sure how you haven’t forgotten that we had a bit of a banking crisis and guess what happened, mortgage lending tightened up due to the unavailability of capital.

But the big surprise to me at the time was how rapidly interest rates declined. They fell from about a 7% posted rate to rates last year that were hovering in the mid threes. That decline in the rates, dramatically lowered lending costs and the price of houses climbed every year since. We’re seeing another sign of irrational exuberance. It has created a small bubble as you can see on the chart. Interest coverage is sitting at 35% for the average buyer of the average house. This is up from an average 25% level where it has been sitting since 1997. But this is nothing like the bubbles of 1982 and 1990

So we have a little bubble, not a major one. Before I opine on when our mini-bubble is going to pop, I’m going to show you another couple of metrics. Tomorrow I’ll look at a metric that applies to people who are already house owners and Thursday I’ll look at new buyers. (If you’re still reading, congratulations and thanks for being a metrics geek.)